Alehound writes " Beer Is Food: The US Government labeled beer(alcohol) as a drug, BeerAdvocate.com begs to differ as they inform their reader that beer can be a part of your diet in a healthy way. Beer does a body good? So the "Beer Gut" is a myth? So why the hell do I have a gut? And yes these guys do drink beer for breakfast." It's only 10 in the morning, I'm dumping out the half pot of coffee left, and cracking open a Boddingtons! Do it!

jmichaelg writes "What do you get when you combine a glass, a PIC computer, two capacitors, a coil and a zener Diode? A wireless beer glass that signals your waiter when you need a refill. The circuit is an RFID transponder that measures the fluid level in a glass and transmits a globally unique ID coupled to the fluid level reading when queried by an antenna hidden in your table. The query provides enough power to drive the circuit so no batteries are needed. A technical paper describes the circuitry in the table and the glass." This hit the news over a year ago, but we didn't have the technical details.

Eric asks: "I just learned that my employer is sending me on a project abroad, in a medium size city for 3 months, starting early August. This will be a 12-hour flight from home and I have friends just an 8-hour drive from there. This is not the first time I am being sent on a remote location, but it used to be short trips (one week, typically), so I didn't have time to get really bored. What do you do while on a long business trip? how do you meet people when you cannot use your network of friends and don't have months to waste on building a new network?"

rhuntley12 writes "Personally, I sit at a computer desk for 10 hours a day with very little actual work. I've also started to get a little belly and out of shape. I know it's real bad in my office, especially with all the beer I consume. What do you do to stay in shape? Any secrets? Recently I've started to do sit ups, push ups, and running up and down the stairs. I get a lot of odd looks, and would prefer something that doesn't make the whole office stare at me. I've looked through some websites with equipment, but it's all serious equipment I can't/won't lug into work. Any suggestions?"

palfreman writes "The Linux Beer Hike is less than a month away. This year it is in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, following last years success in County Clare, Ireland, and the 2001 event in Bouillon, Belgium. This year the dates are Saturday, August 9 to Sunday, August 17. There is also registration site and a members mailinglist. I'm driving from England, a 2400 mile round trip!"

Greg Erway writes "There's a story at Twin Galaxies about my recent record-beating Tapper high score. It took almost 16 straight hours to rack up 9,100,125 points and beat the previous arcade game record, set back in 1986 by Mike Ward." Many of you probably remember Midway's Budweiser-sponsored Tapper arcade machine, and the story estimates that Greg filled over 75,000 virtual beer glasses, as well as having to kill off 79 bartenders at the end of the game to actually get the game over screen.

emmastory writes "Mac OS X Hints is a brand-spanking new O'Reilly book containing over five hundred 'power tips' and tricks for (amazingly enough) Mac OS X. The tips are culled from the website of the same name, written and maintained by Rob Griffiths. The book is edited by David Pogue, of Missing Manual and Pogue Press fame. It's 461 pages, list price is $24.95, and the O'Reilly catalog page (containing samples from the book) is right here." Read on for emmastory's review.

Helstein writes "Finishing a beer in the sun before it gets warm is usually not a problem, but what about those really hot days? Having some hardware lying around there is only one solution to keep the beer cool, that's to make a PeltierBeer."

An anonymous reader writes "Never one to have his thirst for 'free beer' quenched, LinuxDevices.com contributing editor Kevin Dankwardt sets off on a quest to determine just how much freely downloadable embedded Linux software flows from the taps of commercial embedded Linux vendors' websites -- and discovers that there's a lot more available than you might realize. Read Dankwardt's guide to 'free beer' (well, uhm, free embedded Linux, that is)."

bigattichouse asks: "Having just finished my first batch of home-brew beer, I've been thinking about my attraction to 'lost arts', and collecting books on 'how to do stuff'. Some I try, some I just read: metalsmithing, sewing, baking bread, making soap, knot tying, brewing beer, woodcarving, yogurt and cheese.. there are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle... but I find my fellows tend to have books on these subjects lying around, too. Is this common in geekdom? Is this an expression of 'hacking' outside of machinery/engineering?"

Naturally, when answering your questions, he boosted his company. (Wouldn't you?) But I assure you, he wrote these answers himself instead of having them laundered by a PR team. Whether or not you agree with Michael and the way he runs Lindows (and used to run MP3.com) you've got to give him credit for speaking more openly than most other modern American CEOs.

OneInEveryCrowd writes "Rolling Stone reports that four out of five new albums are now produced by a program called Pro Tools (or similar packages) that costs $495 for the home version or $15,000 for the pro version. The article describes a fairly amazing savings in time and effort compared to the older ways of producing an album. I realize that a talented producer can cost a lot of money and some bands drink a lot of beer, but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer?"

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that SnapGear has released a free (as in beer) 'commercial grade' embedded Linux distribution that targets secure Internet-enabled products. The distribution supports a range of processors, both with and without memory management units (MMUs), and includes toolchains and library support. Supported non-MMU processors are said include Motorola ColdFire, ARM, and LEON SPARC, while supported processors having MMUs include Hitachi SuperH, Intel XScale IXP425, Intel x86, and other ARM cores."

bcrowell asks: "Here's a moral conundrum for you. The much-hated DMCA can be a tool to enforce copyleft licenses, and in my case, it may be the only effective tool. I'm the author of some free physics textbooks (all free as in beer, some free as in speech) that are available under the GFDL and OPL copyleft licenses. I've learned that there's a guy on eBay who is selling my books on CD and violating the license. (Selling is allowed, since they're free-as-in-speech, but he's violating the license in various ways, such as not informing his buyers about the license, and selling them under a different title and using the tables of contents in his ads without showing the license or listing me as the author.) It's not just me. He's doing the same thing with other copylefted books, such as this one." The submitter is worried about the ethics behind using the recent misuses we've seen so far. Those interested in this question might also be interested in Prof. Felten's answers from his recent Slashdot interview.

joshmccormack writes "An article in Sunday's New York Times (Free Reg, mah peeps) tells of how Japanese scientists have found a way to make fresh water and energy from temperature differences in ocean water. This may change the rules of what land is considered habitable, and the value of energy." Fascinating stuff, next step is rumored to be beer and power.

These are LinuxWorld columnist Nick Petreley's answers to your questions about the (somewhat controversial) Evans Data Survey he helped analyze that shows Linux is taking more market share from Windows than from Unix.

juxter writes "The BBC is reporting on a London bar which has installed a Bluetooth and WiFi access point. Owners of camera phones can wirelessly send their pictures to an overhead screen and web based gallery - The system runs the LocustWorld Linux based MeshAP which has been extended to drive bluetooth devices as well. Hopefully this will encourage more UK premises to deploy free hot spots."

Noodleroni writes "The First Maybe-Annual 99-Bottles-of-Beer-on-the-Wall-Proggie Contest is now under way! We are looking for your most compact, obfuscated, or other wise cool code to print out the entire lyrics of the aforementioned, very long, song. Maybe we'll even get some submissions written in Malbolge?"

e8johan asks: "I have been thinking about trying to sell a Linux based thin client solution to different markets, like schools. One of the big problems with migrating to Linux is the loss of old applications such as Microsoft Office. Has anyone tried to combine Wine and the LTSP? Does it work? If so, it would enable me (and anyone else) to sell services based on a free (as in libre and beer) server running both open office and their proprietary equivalents in a Windows-like environment, thus reducing the migration costs and making the offer more attractive." While this would be an interesting to tackle, would the licensing terms on some proprietary packages complicate such a system?

Here you go, direct from the keyboard of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dave Barry. You asked, he answered. Why, we do not know. We didn't pay him $127,000 to do this, no matter what anyone says. It must be a slow news week in Miami. Or worse -- and this is a scary thought -- maybe Dave likes Slashdot readers and wants you all to like him, too.